Maya Lin creates a plaza of possibility

The elements of a new Arts Plaza at UC Irvine may be subtle, but they create areas that invite intimate contemplation.

Maya Lin, who was catapulted to prominence in 1981 after winning the competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington while still a Yale undergraduate, has spent the last decade or so expanding the scope of her work to include architecture and sculpture to go with a handful of public-art installations.

Just as important, she has been waging -- in her quiet, spotlight-averse way -- a one-woman campaign against the growing glitz and profit-driven showmanship of the architecture and design field.

Her new Arts Plaza for UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts, scheduled to be officially unveiled in a public ceremony this afternoon, is typical of the ammunition Lin, 46, prefers to use in that fight: It is designed to reward careful attention, and to assert its muted strength by degrees and over time. Still, there is such a thing as too much restraint, and this design finds Lin occasionally skirting the line that divides the quietly profound from the banal.

Commissioned in 2000 and ultimately built for $3.6 million, the project is an attempt by UC Irvine to take a group of forgettable, concrete-lined walkways between the buildings that house its various arts programs and turn them into a gathering space -- and a modestly sized outdoor performance venue.

Irvine also hopes it will boost the School of the Arts' sense of identity and by extension provide a new center of gravity on the north side of campus. For the most part, only sections of the Irvine campus near circular Aldrich Park, around which the entire university plan is organized, have seemed central.

It is too bad that the commission didn't include the chance for Lin, who is beginning to find her voice as an architect, to design a free-standing building. In a public plaza and skating rink that opened in 2001 in downtown Grand Rapids, Mich. -- a project Lin named "Ecliptic" -- she added concrete outbuildings that despite their modest scale help give the space as a whole a visual coherence. She has also designed a library and an adjacent chapel for the Children's Defense Fund in Clinton, Tenn., along with a small number of apartments and houses.

But there was no room here for a new building, however small. Instead, Irvine asked Lin -- whose father served as dean of fine arts at Ohio University when she was a child, making this project particularly attractive to her -- to squeeze a new plaza into the space between existing academic and performance halls, a campus art gallery and a cafe.

Like most of Lin's work, the result, which covers about 30,000 square feet, is subtle to the point of invisibility, particularly to eyes trained to respond to the hard, torqued or billowing forms of contemporary architecture.

The design ties together three existing student walkways into a carefully landscaped and fully composed, if less than eye-catching, space. Officially called a plaza, it actually hovers somewhere between an area to pass through and a destination in its own right. It is entirely possible to imagine an Irvine student, distracted by a cellphone call or an iPod, walking into the space and failing to notice that much -- or indeed anything -- has changed.

But quite a bit has: Working with Santa Monica landscape architect Pamela Burton, Lin has added nearly 50 trees (27 California sycamores, 13 Mexican sycamores and nine Valencia oranges) to the site. She has also revamped a small amphitheater into a flowing carpet of grass that the school says will hold 200 people and attached four small video monitors, to show new-media work by students and established artists, to one facade of Winifred Smith Hall. Colored lights embedded in the pavement lead pedestrians from the edges of the plaza to the center.

The heart of the design is a rectangular patch of ground near the entrance to the Claire Trevor Theatre (which was itself revamped in 2002). Here, at the spot where all of the site's axes intersect, Lin has placed a low-lying rectangular fountain, made of black granite, and seven simple granite benches. The fountain, which Lin calls a "water table," recalls the forms of her Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala., and of the Women's Table, her 1993 monument to coeducation at Yale.

In the place of the words and numbers that were inscribed on those historical markers, though, the surface of the fountain here features an abstract design: a simple, fluid line drawing through which the water flows.

The text that she used in her earlier fountains, Lin said in a filmed interview released by UC Irvine, "has been reduced to the mark of the human hand. So that you get to the center [of the plaza] and realize that this is a school of the arts and that the human hand, the drawn form, has become my language."